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The Undecider

Marc Baum, whose political indecision is reflected on the front of his West Village town house.Credit
Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

WHEN it comes to this year’s presidential race, Marc Baum offers, like a villanelle, two refrains: “I’m a lifelong Democrat” and “I have no idea.”

So it was not surprising that several weeks ago, New Yorkers traveling along Mr. Baum’s block on West 12th Street, between West Fourth Street and Greenwich Avenue, began noticing a strange sight. For a time, an old “Obama for Senate” campaign sign was tacked to the front door of his brick town house. Not long after, a “Hillary for President” placard, which Mr. Baum had fashioned using markers and poster board, appeared above it.

Friends and neighbors were perplexed. Liz Wasden, who passes the house commuting to and from work, remembered thinking: “Now there’s somebody who’s clearly conflicted about the upcoming primaries.”

The New York primary has come and gone, but Mr. Baum’s dueling signs endure. (His crudely made Clinton poster has yielded to an official one produced by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign.) As the Democratic Party remains without a presumptive presidential nominee, the signs illustrate the ambivalence that Mr. Baum and many others are feeling during this election season.

Mr. Baum, a 49-year-old lawyer for Ramius Capital Group, a New York hedge fund, grew up in Evanston, Ill., and comes from what he describes as “very politically active people.” This election, he says, “is a complicated one.” While he says that either a Clinton or an Obama presidency would bring a pronounced improvement to “the really awful federal government we have at the moment,” his efforts to choose between the two candidates have thus far proved fruitless.

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“I just don’t know,” he said with a shrug the other day, as he sat on his living room couch, sipping Scotch. The signs, he added, “are me going, ‘I don’t know what side I come down on.’ ”

Mr. Baum developed an interest in politics early on, distributing leaflets door to door for a local politician when he was 5. “And I was a ward chairman for Ed Muskie in 1972,” he said. “Which was ridiculous. If you’ve got a 13-year-old doing that, then the campaign probably isn’t working.”

Mr. Baum fleetingly sided with one of the two Democratic candidates on Feb. 5, the day of the primary. “I walked to the polls 52-48,” he said. But he declined to reveal how he had voted. “It was how I was feeling that day,” he said. “On a different day, I might have done something else.”